


To Die, To Sleep - To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

by DavidTennantsTrainers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: An Officer and the Noble Woman, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Post-Series, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DavidTennantsTrainers/pseuds/DavidTennantsTrainers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna Noble was happy, or at least that's what she kept telling herself and anyone else who cared to listen.  But then the sun goes down....</p><p>A prequel of sorts, a bit of character background for my Donna Noble in An Officer and the Noble Woman, but it stands alone if you don't feel like tackling that behemoth in progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Die, To Sleep - To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Donna Noble was happy, or at least that's what she kept telling herself and anyone else who cared to listen. After all, she had everything anyone could hope for in life: the love of a good, sweet man, a gorgeous house with room for a passel of kids, and money enough so she need never work or worry again. She could go exactly where she liked whenever the fancy took hold and do whatever she pleased when she got there. She took leisurely holidays to the beach and treated Nerys and Susie to shopping extravaganzas that were the stuff of shop-girls-on-commission legend. In the light of day, Donna Nobel's life was nothing short of a happily-ever-after tale come true. Once the sun went down, however, her life was an altogether different kind of story.

It was all down to the fairy dust, as Shaun called it, that golden cloud of dancing lights. While she slept, the gentle warmth of it surrounded her, enveloped her, danced across her skin in a shimmering curtain of light, night after night. It had scared the hell out of Shaun the first time he’d awakened in the middle of the night for a drink. They'd been to see all the specialists, every expert on every continent and more than a few quacks besides. No one understood it, no one could explain it and it was only her vast sums of cash that kept her name disconnected from the scholarly works that followed in her wake.

In the end, Donna just accepted it, even when Shaun couldn't and took to falling asleep in the media room night after night, bathed in the gentle glow of the outrageously-expensive wall-to-wall high definition telly. _So much for that_ _passel of children_ , she thought wryly. And so that was how Donna Noble, ensconced in that beautiful canopy bed in that amazing house with her lovely husband, the envy of all her friends and frenemies, came to sleep and to dream alone.

The light was tender at first, teasing and tickling, almost familiar and friendly until it abruptly looped around and attacked. The light flared so brightly it hurt, slamming into her chest, piercing her heart and propelling her back across the room while that dazzling man shrieked her name in horror. She could see him reaching out for her, and the arm he extended in mute desperation strobed madly, flashing brown one moment and blue the next.

All these images swam around her, streaming and swirling and spinning, threatening to overwhelm her senses and send her down into the depths of her darkest dreams. She scrabbled about madly, trying to regain her equilibrium, but lost in the middle of the maelstrom, she couldn't find her footing. She was drowning in it all, going down for the third time and then It was there. Standing in the middle of it all, a dark blue anchor in a typhoon, a claustrophobically cavernous safe haven in the storm, was a box.

Donna brushed her fingers against It and suddenly, It was a She and Donna knew Her. She knew them. She knew him, and as he reached for her hand, she knew everything. She was whole again. She was healed. The mysteries were solved, the answers were found, the lost puzzle pieces put in place at last, and she was once again herself. But even in her dreams, she knew it couldn’t last and she fought to keep herself from waking.

She saw flashes of impossibly-complicated machinery and could almost swear it was her own hands she saw flitting across the controls at a hundred words per minute, flipping switches and pushing buttons with a confidence she could never possess. She tried to focus on her surroundings, to get her bearings and work out where she was, but the walls seemed to expand and pulse with life around her. She was lost in a funhouse maze filled with distorting mirrors and she wished there was something she could do to block out the sickening sensation where nothing she saw made sense.

Wherever she was, though, she wasn’t alone. There were people there, faces and voices swimming in and out of focus wherever she turned. But in the middle of it all was a tall man, standing firm as everything else swirled around him. She knew him and trusted him with her life but for some reason, she would never, could never, tell him that. He stood in front of her, an island of anguished calm in the howling madness, his hand thrown out like a lifeline and Donna knew all she had to do was take it.

She stretched towards him desperately, and as her fingers curled around his long, elegant, achingly-familiar hand, she knew. His touch held all the answers she craved. She has only to lift her eyes to meet his and everything will be all right. She will be made whole. She will remember everything. All she has to do is raise her face to his…

The alarm on her mobile trilled in demand, some silly reggae song Nerys added as a joke when Donna left her phone on the table as she popped off to the loo at the George one night. One stupid chorus of Billionaire and he was gone. The man was rudely wrenched from her grasp, the crystal clarity of the images clouded over, cracked and crazed until they were unrecognizable and for another morning, Donna Noble awoke in a suburban palace on the far edge of Chiswick, alone in a too-big bed, with only snatches of dim memories of a dream for companionship.


End file.
